Have you ever thought that having a messy room might, in fact, be a sign of creativity?
Einstein once said that a desk is a reflection of what is in your head; “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what are we to think of those with an empty desk?”
It’s time to debunk the rumours that mess equates to disaster, because it seems to be that the messier a person tends to be, the more creative they tend to be.
It has been drilled into us since day one that we need to keep ourselves organised in every area of our lives in order to be successful, but people such as Mark Zuckerberg had messy desks, and Facebook is one of the most successful ventures of this lifetime. If you sat at Max Levchin’s desk you wouldn’t be able to move sideways, yet he created PayPal, which has created a new wave of money management that has changed how we manage our accounts. See where I’m going with this?
The thing about the mess is, it is actually organised in its own way. Growing up, my messy room was the bane of my mother’s life. We were constantly at loggerheads about the state of my room, and she always said that I would never get anything done in such a mess. Now personally, I know where everything is on my desk and in my room, but if someone else were to look for something they would probably get lost, yet I am still (somewhat) successful in the ventures that I have pursued.
Chances are, you know your own mess, and to you, it’s not that messy. We are able to work more efficiently in our own mess and disorganisation than we are if we were to work within set constructs of what is a predictable workspace.
In a way, our own mess can comfort us
We each have our own, individual way of doing things and organising things. When our personal spaces are set out as we like them, we are more relaxed and our creativity is able to flow much better. As the saying goes, ‘there is a method to the madness.’
This is not to say, however, that creativity cannot stem from organisation. There is no direct relationship between mess and creativity. We each have our own methods of doing things and how we like things to look.
So I’m not suggesting that you should go home and trash your office in the hope of some sort creative epiphany because that’s a little counter-productive. Just don’t get too wound up about ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’. Allow yourself to relax and settle in, and don’t care so much if you have a messy room. Creativity will come if you let it.
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